The promising nonlinear video editor Kdenlive has made its first non beta for KDE 4, version 0.7 is on us. This closes another gap of the free desktop world: a usable open source video editor. Kdenlive has the potential to become the Amarok or K3b of video editors, offering comfort and elegance so far not available in alternative programs. The feature set looks amazingly complete and far exceeds the KDE 3 version already. Check the release announcement.

This is the official announcement:

We are glad to announce the immediate release of Kdenlive 0.7

This is the first release of Kdenlive for KDE 4. Here is a quick list of improvements over the previous KDE 3 version:

Complete rewrite of the communication with the MLT video framework, which means a huge speedup in all timeline operations

it didn't really do all that much, to be honest, especially given that it was 6 or so years in development.

however, much of what it did, it did at least decently and often well. it did some things rather poorly and making it do new things was overly difficult. extending it's bag of tricks was rediculously difficult, and it was graphically very limited. it was still ahead of most other FOSS panel systems, though.

Yes, indeed. Volumes: looking at the whole plasma development cycle, we're talking about a year and a half, maybe two of development to develop the whole desktop thing, including panel. When you compare that to the five or six years needed for Kicker, the only logical conclusion is that plasma development is amazingly rapid.

I largely agree with the OP.
KDE 4 is a great framework with lots of nice 'applets' and 4.2 is on schedule to deliver a nice, polished user experience.
However, a desktop environmnet needs more than just a pretty face and the basic apps. (OS/2 anyone?)
I think it will stand or fall however with the avaialbility of large, end-user applications using its libraries.
The applications mentioned are mostly the ones I woudl list (except for maybe KMplayer).
I would add KOffice for the non-work related 'office' tasks (for work related, Oo.org is way better albeit rather bloated) KOffice's Kita also seems a promising app.
I would even add KDevelop which, while not a 'main-stream' app will put more developers on KDE4
The good news is of course that most of these apps are well on track to have fully formed KDE4 variants in the near to mid future.

yeah... KMplayer is in my experience broken and quite crashy. Haven't looked at it so recently but I was under the impression that it wasn't developing very fast (at least not at the speed of SMplayer).

SMplayer is really nice, I wish there was a kde integrated app with the same power and flexibility as SMplayer. Last thing i heard was of the kaffeine guys complaining about the lack of features in phonon for them to do their stuff.

Drag the rotate effect onto the clip? That seems.. an odd sort of workflow. Maybe I'm just saying that because (especially because) I've never seen anything like that before.

It has to be dragged from somewhere, why isn't that somewhere just a button? For ease of use applying it to a specific clip? That's actually interesting sounding. Alternative would be an "active" clip that button presses acted on.

I agree with you, but just because we are more used to it. Because most Windows(tm) apps work this way.

But think twice, forcing the user to know what is the "active" clip seems awkward to me. The Kde4 goal (imho) is to a desktop experience "that is not on your way". And to date it's a great succes with basics apps (dolphin and such).

And now, imagine using that work-flow on a touch-screen : draging the effect on the clip with your finger. It's look intutive for me. At least it don't ask the user to check which is the "current active clip".

Well, I've spent several hours learning how to rotate an AVI in Ubuntu. I've used mencoder with success - as you would expect with a CLI tool, I had to read a fair bit of documentation.

Then I saw this thread and though I'd try Kdenlive - being a GUI I'd expect it to be pretty straight-forward. Well, it's so unintuitive I've given up. I dragged my AVI into a new project (because I could not see how else to add it!). The 'rotate' effect is listed in the Effects menu, but I can find no way to apply it. The 'drag' action described here is impossible from the menu.

So, sorry guys I'm sure it's a great tool but as the GIMP boys found, you need to spend a lot of time on the UI and beginner tips if you're going to get any take-up. I'm off to build my movie in iMovie on the Mac. Which is a great pity, but it will work.

Not to speak English correctly is being an ignorant?. Sadly, countries like yours (I'm assuming you're japanese; but this applies to most of Europe, especially Germanic Europe and many of Latin Europe, and many countries all over the world as well) have been so deeply colonized by their former invaders that you unconsciously believe that speaking English is almost as common as the sun raising every day. Well, probably non native English speakers (who are most of people, ironically) should post in their native languages and call "ingnorants" all those who weren't able to understand and post replies in said languages; or perhaps we should learn Esperanto, Modern Latin, or whatever non-national language you want and create a real standard for international communication instead adopting English and benefit American culture and companies, who have the whole world as a market which speaks their language.

And yes, being pedant is a bad thing, especially because it's usually a fake attitude. The "savant" doesn't need to show off, just the one who is insecure, ;p.

So, to Moritz, thanks for your software and go ahead with your incorrect English or may them learn German, sch*ize! :)

Not to speak English correctly is being an ignorant?. Sadly, countries like yours (I'm assuming you're japanese; but this applies to most of Europe, especially Germanic Europe and many of Latin Europe, and many countries all over the world as well) have been so deeply colonized by their former invaders that you unconsciously believe that speaking English is almost as common as the sun raising every day. Well, probably non native English speakers (who are most of people, ironically) should post in their native languages and call "ingnorants" all those who weren't able to understand and post replies in said languages; or perhaps we should learn Esperanto, Modern Latin, or whatever non-national language you want and create a real standard for international communication instead adopting English and benefit American culture and companies, who have the whole world as a market which speaks their language.

And yes, being pedant is a bad thing, especially because it's usually a fake attitude. The "savant" doesn't need to show off, just the one who is insecure, ;p.

So, to Moritz, thanks for your software and go ahead with your incorrect English or may them learn German, sch*ize! :)

Just so you all know, as much as I love kdenlive 0.7, there's something better out in about 3 weeks...

Kdenlive 0.7.1!

Don't let the small version number increase fool you. Even now, there's already over 40 improvements comitted including enhanced screen recording (with mouse follow option), speed improvements, more comprehensive shortcuts, recursive search for missing clips and a brand new (to this version) tool, the spacer tool, which lets you easily move many clips and adjust the space between them.

The number of bug fixes and crash hardening is equally impressive.

All this is just in the 18 days since 0.7 launched, and there's 25 days to go (yes, Christmas is d-day). I just wish I could code, so I could get Christmas early. ;-)

Oh well, I'll just have to settle for using the GUI Builder Wizard to compile it as I wait impatiently *taps fingers on table*.

I have used the old Version already and was very pleased to her about that news bunt unfortunately I cant use it. I have the new Kubuntu, and the debian-Multimedia in my sources.list but I have difficulty's with some packages witch wont Install.

You're generally better off rebuilding such packages and get better compatibility to boot. Chuck in the deb-src line from Debian Multimedia rather than the deb line. Say you want to build and install devede on your Ubuntu box:

apt-get build-dep devede (this fetches the -dev and library packages you need to build the package from your normal Ubuntu repository. Unless you're backporting to an ancient distro, this should go without hitches. Otherwise you may have build and install a few -dev packages first. I don't bother with this if the build deps I have to port are excessive.)

If all went well you can now install the deb you'll find in this directory. It will be built against the Ubuntu dev libraries but will otherwise act like you installed it from Debian Multimedia and won't cause the potential problems bringing in a lot of libraries from a cousin distro can cause.

This basic procedure can be used on Debian or any Debian derivative to build packages from cousin distros.

I used it to installed the latest version on my Debian Sid machine last night and it was suprisingly easy to use. (To be fair ffmpeg took a couple of attempts to build but that was because I ignored the package list and only added missing dependencies one at a time following each build error!)

My first impression of Kdenlive is wow! I've only just started to play around with video editing, but of the packages I've tried Kdenlive seems the most stable and has the cleanest interface. Great work.

I'm officially impressed! Had to install a few dependencies (I used all from their respective SVN repos), and then building went smooth as silk. My first attempt to make an *.flv from screen grabbing was a success. I didn't even have to read a manual -- everything was quite intuitive. Thanks a lot for kdenlive!

With the current version, is it possible to have the typical "chroma" effect? (record yourself in front of a green/blue background and then render a video in that background)

Is there any masking support? subtitles?

Months ago I made a fun short video to help me to learn Cinelerra. The result was 3 "me" speaking with each other in the same room. Two on the sides and one in the middle near the camera, obscuring partially the other two. To make the first two, I put one clip at the back of the stack, then the other above it, with one half masked out. That did the trick. The third was more difficult. I had to compute the differences between the 3rd clip and the background (an empty room), and discard those pixels that were equal. It was not perfect, but it help me to learn some basic things with masks.

So, now I have to ask: is it possible to create such a video with the current version of Kdenlive? If not, are such features planned for anytime soon?

Uh, yes, you are correct that it's API is not stable; there is still much work to be done. It's implementation is very stable for specific commercial applications for which I have used it. Of course, v0.3.2 is not mature; it was released less than a month ago. Now, v0.1.0, released in May, 2004 after the initial 6 months of intense development - about 4.5 years old - now, that is mature!